Fear factors: What worries Romney backers

Mitt Romney has done the unthinkable: silenced the legions of conservatives who saw him as too starched, too ideologically wobbly and too Richie Rich to win a few months ago.

Now comes the hard part: getting those same conservatives not to pop off as he moves to confront a half-dozen very Mitt-specific political dangers — the ones top Republican officials say he must navigate to unite the party and attract skeptical conservatives and independents this summer.

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Their calculus: President Barack Obama’s campaign is threatened most by events he can’t control: a European financial catastrophe, an Israeli attack on Iran that could goose gas prices, economic stagnation.

Mitt Romney’s campaign is threatened most by the man himself.

And that’s pretty scary to GOP insiders, right at a moment when they’re sensing they could win this thing. They know Obama won’t give it away — he plays within himself, he’s too seasoned a politician to do that. Plus, voters have a sense of what they’d get with Obama II, even if they’re a bit lukewarm about the first term.

With Romney, it’s just the opposite. Voters are just getting to know the guy, and there’s a lot there they might not like — so much of it personal, relating to Romney the man and Romney the candidate, according to these GOP officials, even those who praise his strong showing out of the gate in the general election. His Mormon faith. His stiff public appearance. His ideological inconsistency. His trouble confronting and controlling the Donald Trumps of the party. His knack for cringe-worthy stabs at connecting.

“I worry that the default will be for the devil you know over the devil you don’t,” said William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard.

In interviews with top officials nationwide, Republicans expressed fear Romney will start, well, acting like Romney again — by improvising, maybe sparking another my-friends-own-NFL-teams moment in a clumsy attempt at connecting with voters. Or his Mormon faith will spook Christians more than is commonly thought – or detected in public polls. A surrogate is virtually certain to say something crazy — like Donald Trump, who seems to double-down on questioning Obama’s birthplace every chance he gets, including in an interview with POLITICO below.

Some of the Republicans have a prescription to cure Romney’s Romney problem: Go big. Frame the election around big things to make the little things that worry people about Romney seem less important. Then he has to hope voters get on board.